BUSH WARNS SOVIETS NOT TO USE VIOLENCE PRESIDENT CONDEMNS LITHUANIA SUPPRESSION

WASHINGTON -- President Bush condemned on Sunday the Kremlin's violent weekend suppression of Lithuania, warning that Moscow's use of force "threatened to set back or perhaps even reverse" Soviet reforms and to jeopardize the country's relations with the United States.

"We condemn these acts, which could not help but affect our relationship," Bush said upon arrival at the White House from Camp David, Md. "The turn of events there is deeply disturbing."

The president said that it was too soon to say whether he would still travel to Moscow for next month's scheduled superpower summit. "That's too hypothetical," he said. "What I am saying is I hope the crackdown will not continue."

Nevertheless, the Soviet government's newly militant line toward its Baltic states has clearly thrown the administration into a quandary, dependent as it has been on Soviet support in its confrontation with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"No, this could not have come at a worse time," one administration official said.

A crisis planning council met at the White House while Bush, still at Camp David, weighed what to do after Soviet tanks and paratroopers stormed the Lithuanian republic's television station, killing 13 people and injuring more than 110 others.

Later, Bush, said that he spoke with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Sunday by telephone "to encourage the peaceful change there and not the use of force." Nevertheless, Bush said, he did not know if Gorbachev had directed the crackdown. "I just don't know the facts on it," he said.

Administration officials appeared likewise to be groping for an appropriate response, which triggered from other world capitals similar reactions of outrage over the incident and uncertainty about what to do next.

A veritable parade of other senior administration aides, appearing on the Sunday morning news programs, offered similar sentiments.

"Violence is incompatible with the solution to this problem; it's incompatible with perestroika, and it's incompatible with the move of U.S.-Soviet relations toward partnership," said National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, on NBC's Meet the Press.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who stirred controversy in 1989 after he expressed pessimism about Gorbachev's chances for political survival, said on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley that if Gorbachev "has decided to resort to force to maintain control over the Baltic republics, to let the tanks rolls if you will, that clearly sends a very terrible signal about the prospects for future democratization and reform of the Soviet Union."